Event Details

Event Details

Monkey in the Shade

by Steven HaworthTuesday, March 26– 7:30 pm

In Harvey, Louisiana in 1978, a man named Monkey works in the oil patch as a derrick man and lives in a bar/restaurant/boarding house called Clay and Minnie’s. Clay and Minnie’s is run by a violent ex-con named Clay Boudreaux and his wife Miz Minnie. Monkey is estranged from his family but works hard to send money to his ex-wife and two daughters. One day a teenage boy named Sean arrives. He has no money, no skills, is a college dropout, and was just kicked out of his home in Minnesota. He heard about the oil boom in Louisiana, that virtually anyone could get a job, and Clay and Minnie’s was the hangout to ask for one. Monkey tries to protect Sean as he gets more and more in trouble with Clay whose purposes are mysterious but whose violence is on display.

Forty years later in 2018, Sean, now a sometime freelance journalist whose career has gone sideways, returns to Louisiana for medical reasons. Now 58 he has a heart condition and is receiving tests at Tulane Medical in New Orleans. But visiting Harvey across the river he learns of the murder of Clay Boudreaux sometime in the decade after he left and decides to investigate. However, no one’s memory is reliable, including his own, and as he gets closer to the truth he comes to realize that the shape of his life is something radically different than he supposed.

Steven Haworth is an award winning playwright who was Writer-in-Residence at this year’s Seven Devils Playwrights Conference working on his play Monkey in the Shade. He work has been seen on the stages of New Ohio Theatre, Ashland New Play Festival, First Look Festival, Open Fist Theatre, Abingdon Theatre, Project III Ensemble Theatre, and Mile Square Theatre. Steven was a founding member and Associate Artistic Director of the Project III Ensemble Theatre in residence at the Ohio Theatre in NYC. As an actor he has performed in New York, Los Angeles, and regional theatre. He holds an MFA in playwriting from Carnegie Mellon University. www.StevenHaworth.com